Imported from bighardperson/computer-science-skills-collection (skills/research-library/SKILL.md). Install upstream with npx skills add bighardperson/computer-science-skills-collection --skill research-library. Copyright stays with the author (MIT).

Research Library Skill

A local-first multimedia research library for capturing, organizing, and searching hardware project knowledge.

What It Does

• Store documents — Code, PDFs, CAD files, images, schematics
• Extract automatically — Text from PDFs, EXIF from images, functions from code
• Search intelligently — Full-text with material-type weighting (your work ranks higher than external research)
• Project isolation — Arduino separate from CNC; no contamination
• Cross-reference — Link knowledge: "this servo tuning applies to that project"
• Async extraction — Searches never block while OCR runs
• Backup daily — 30-day rolling snapshots

Installation

clawhub install research-library
# OR
pip install /path/to/research-library

Quick Start

# Initialize database
reslib status

# Add a project
reslib add ~/projects/arduino/servo.py --project arduino --material-type reference

# Search
reslib search "servo tuning"

# Link knowledge
reslib link 5 12 --type applies_to

Features

CLI Commands

• reslib add — Import documents (auto-detect + extract)
• reslib search — Full-text search with filters
• reslib get — View document details
• reslib archive / reslib unarchive — Manage documents
• reslib export — Export as JSON/Markdown
• reslib link — Create document relationships
• reslib projects — Manage projects
• reslib tags — Manage tags
• reslib status — System overview
• reslib backup / reslib restore — Snapshots
• reslib smoke_test.sh — Quick validation

Technical

• Storage: SQLite 3.45+ with FTS5 virtual table
• Extraction: PDF (pdfplumber + OCR), images (EXIF + OCR), code (AST + regex)
• Confidence Scoring: 0.0-1.0 based on quality + source
• Material Weighting: Reference (1.0) vs Research (0.5)
• Project Isolation: Scoped searches, no contamination
• Async Workers: 2-4 configurable extraction workers
• Catalog Separation: real_world vs openclaw projects
• Backup: Daily snapshots, 30-day retention

Configuration

Copy reslib/config.json and customize:

{
  "db_path": "~/.openclaw/research/library.db",
  "num_workers": 2,
  "worker_timeout_sec": 300,
  "max_retries": 3,
  "backup_retention_days": 30,
  "backup_dir": "~/.openclaw/research/backups",
  "file_size_limit_mb": 200,
  "project_size_limit_gb": 2
}

Integration with War Room

Use RL1 protocol in war room DNA:

from reslib import ResearchDatabase, ResearchSearch

db = ResearchDatabase()
search = ResearchSearch(db)

# Before researching, check existing knowledge
prior = search.search("servo tuning", project="rc-quadcopter")
if prior:
    print(f"Found {len(prior)} prior items")
else:
    # New research needed...
    db.add_research(title="...", content="...", ...)

Performance

All targets exceeded:

Testing

# Run all tests
pytest tests/

# Quick smoke test
bash reslib/smoke_test.sh

# Performance tests
pytest tests/test_integration.py -v -k stress

Known Limitations (Phase 2)

• OCR quality varies on hand-drawn sketches
• FTS5 designed for <10K documents (PostgreSQL path for scale)
• No automatic web research gathering (manual only)
• Vector embeddings ready but inactive
• CAD file parsing is metadata-only

Documentation

See /docs/:

• CLI-REFERENCE.md — All commands + examples
• EXTRACTION-GUIDE.md — How extraction works
• SEARCH-GUIDE.md — Ranking + weighting
• WORKER-GUIDE.md — Async queue details
• INTEGRATION.md — War room RL1 protocol

Phase 2 Roadmap

• Real-world PDF calibration
• FTS5 scaling tests (10K docs)
• Auto-detection (reference vs research)
• Web research enrichment
• Vector embeddings (semantic search)
• PostgreSQL upgrade path

Building From Source

cd research-library
pip install -e .
pytest tests/
python -m reslib status

Support

Issues? See TECHNICAL-NOTES.md for troubleshooting.

Production-ready MVP. 214 tests passing. 15K lines. Ready to use.